The recent deaths of Blacks at the hands of police has stoked up the concept of equality into a bonfire with protests and demonstrations across the nation stating that Black Lives Matter. The problem is that equality got buried in Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution way back in 1787. Better known as the three-fifths compromise, counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for tax and representation purposes.
Most middle school students are familiar with John Locke and Montesquieu’s concepts on equal justice and the rule of law. These concepts moved us away from autocratic laws, orders and decrees put forth arbitrarily from on high.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 in our Declaration of Independence: “that all men are created equal.” Strangely that concept went out the window in just over a decade when 50 of the best minds in the original 12 states (Rhode Island did not send a delegation to Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia) tried to form a more perfect union with “We the People.” The Constitution was intended to break away from a loose confederation of independent states serving in their best interests to a federation of states with a stronger national government instead. These men (sorry ladies it was different era and a battle to be fought later) hammered out a series of compromises on how a new government should be formed.
The Continental Congress grappled with the three-fifths ratio but could not amend the Articles of Confederation because it took an unanimous decision of all 13 states to approve amendments. The 1787 Constitution is comprised of compromises. The three-fifths compromise found its way into the approved Constitution. It is the a compromise that negates the Jeffersonian concept that all men are created and ties voting and representation to wealth and human ownership. After all the South was operating under a slave economy that profited from cash crops like tobacco and cotton.
Slavery and racial inequality is our original sin. It started with the Native Americans and continues today still causing racial, gender and socio-economic problems. As a nation we hardly got out of the starting gate in dropping the old British social class structure before we put a numerical value on people. While many other groups in our country may have been undervalued for doing work “Americans” won’t do, none has had a numerical value placed on them, except Blacks. It could be argued that as long as one group is being valued less it devalues everybody. The opposite holds true, too. A multi-millionaire sex offender can push through a revolving door of justice and walk right in and out of jail while others are put into the gulag to rot. It puts us all on some sort of nebulous sliding scale of justice instead of a balanced set of scales. Equal justice under the law becomes a tilted roulette wheel that excludes many from sitting at the table let alone buying a chip in a rigged game
Now some scholars say the three-fifths compromise was a way to appease the South to accept the new Constitution. Had those men in Philadelphia not addressed slavery at all, a slave would not have been counted as anything. This would have given real meaning to Roger B. Taney’s ruling in the Dred Scott Supreme Court case where he ruled that slaves were property. This went beyond three-fifths. It negated the belief that slaves were even people. And Taney’s decision was in 1856, almost 80 years after the ratification of the Constitution.
The three-fifths compromise allowed the South to count three-fifths of each slave as a person for representation and tax purposes. This really turns out to be a halfway measure in dealing with the economic wealth slaves were generating for the nation. It will fester up in the Union through a series of additional compromises until the first shots are fired at Fort Sumter. The three-fifths compromise assured that from the 1800 election to the 1856 election that there would be enough Electoral College votes in the South that a pro-slavery president would always be elected. The Senate, by design, was always evenly split between Free and Slave states. It was not until the North’s population grew to a point were the balance of power in the House was shifting northward that Northern population growth broke the South’s voting grip in the Electoral College and brought in the first anti-slave president, Abraham Lincoln, a Republican.
This really is not hard to understand when we look at say one state: South Carolina, the first state to leave the Union in 1860. In 1790 South Carolina’s Black population was about 43 percent of its total population. By 1860 the Black population was closing in on 60 percent. Under the three-fifths compromise that Black population would equal close to 248,000 people; just under half of South Carolina’s total population for tax and representation purposes. Black lives have always mattered. What mattered was how they were counted.
Once the Civil War was over and the South and slavery were defeated, counting freed Blacks was not the problem. It was a problem of suppressing a large portion of the Black population. Two concepts that needed to be suppressed were the one-man-one-vote concept and equal justice under the law. By 1900, states like Mississippi and South Carolina had Black populations that were nearly 60 percent. Other Deep South states had Black populations well over 40 percent. For the defeated ruling elite of the South, this was not the sort of democracy or society they envisioned. Rule of law became a rule of repression.
Thirty-five years after the end of the Civil War Jim Crow laws are firmly in place and a rebirth of Confederate pride builds up with statues honoring those who fought in the “Lost Cause.” A Confederate mystification sweeps the South. And with it, it brings in a new breed of Klansmen enforcing laws at the end of a rope. And this, only 25 to 30 years after passing the civil rights amendments: the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. It would take another 65 years for these Amendments to be federally enforced. And many would argue that they are still not being enforced to the full extent of their intentions.
For many, the compromising and suppression is over. The three-fifths compromise may not be in the forefront of today’s protests. But since 1789 when the Constitution was approved it seems that Blacks Americans are still waiting for that other two-fifths to matter.
https://www.theusconstitution.org/news/understanding-the-three-fifths-compromise/
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=163
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